Richard Stallman talking about Copyright in the digital age at University of Sussex on 8 March 2011

A talk by Richard Stallman, the pioneer of the CopyLeft movement, at the University of Sussex. Stallman was speaking on the need to reform a copyright system which has outgrown the historical circumstances of its creation and now serves the mega corporations, such as Disney, as opposed to the majority of the population.

Stallman’s talk is broad-ranging, from E-Book readers (“The Amazon Swindle”) through the Sony rootkit fiasco to redefining copyright terms based on the category of the work (utilitarian: no copyright; art: copyright — 10 years?). He was polemical in his call for a complete destruction of the record companies that deserve nothing more than obliteration for their complicity in attempting to take away users’ freedoms.

A high point was, in my mind, the argument on schools breeding dependence upon proprietary software. While this demonstrates the fact that, for Stallman, almost every ethical principle can be deduced from parallels in the realm of free software, his argument did, at the end of the day, work: would you let a drug dealer inject children free of charge (gratis) so that, when they leave, they will be hooked on an expensive product?